


suddenly i’ve run out of secrets

by Alias (anafabula)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Arguing, Banned Together Bingo 2020, Brief Relationship Study Thereof, By way of, Canon Gay Relationship, Canon-Compliant, Canon-Typical Inherent Power Imbalance, Canon-Typical Self-Destructive Thoughts, Established Relationship, Guilt, M/M, Martin is in a Bad headspace so just generally bear that in mind, Post-Episode: e186 Quiet (The Magnus Archives), Somewhere in the indefinite future of season 5, author is unsure if this resolution should be advertised as happy per se, but does think it’s a better outcome than the alternatives, but like. weird, for now (dun dun dunnn), it’s conflict with monsters, monster conflict
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:27:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27583373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: “You’ve changed,” Jon says.“Well,” Martin says. “Yeah. People do that, Jon.”“Yes.” Jon pinches his nose and Martin feels, for the first time in this conversation, the specific discomfort of not being sure where he stands after all. “They do.”(or, a run-in with the power dynamics inherent to arguing with your quasi-omnipotent boyfriend about your place in a world defined by his control over it.)
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 4
Kudos: 77
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	suddenly i’ve run out of secrets

**Author's Note:**

> Gentle Giant prompt: “Cross-Cultural Misinterpretation”. (A lot of my GG card fic is “G on ao3” in the sense that is also “PG by ratings standards with five options instead of four”, I think—I have been thinking about it a lot! Regardless, please mind the tags if show-style mental health issues can be less than okay for audiences of you in particular.) 
> 
> This fic idea grabbed me by the throat compellingly enough on Thursday that I am almost surprised it took me halfway past the next episode to finish writing. Almost.

“I won’t do that, Martin,” Jon says, his voice almost unbearably gentle. “I can’t.”

“You— You don’t understand,” Martin says, trying to be frustrated instead of plaintive. And, all right, fine, he does in fact deserve the way Jon’s mouth twitches at that, the disapproving lift of his eyebrows. (Martin has wondered if it bothers Jon, being so much the proverbial open book, sometimes. It was already close to this bad—is it bad if Jon doesn’t mind?—for as far back as Martin can remember trying to read him; so maybe it really doesn’t trouble him, somehow, maybe that’s just a part of him. But Martin can’t imagine living with that. All the more so now.) “Okay, look, either you read my mind—”

“I don’t,” Jon interrupts anxiously, the familiar conversation overriding the unfamiliar one. “I— I try not to.”

“—or it’s possible for you to be wrong about what I’m actually thinking,” Martin continues, dogged, trying to drag himself back on track where quite a lot of him does not want to go. “Because, look, all-powerful omniscience, whatever, you _can_ still _be wrong_. And you’re wrong.”

Jon’s mouth twitches again, downward this time. It’s the face he makes when actively working not to say something he’s noticed is condescending, or at least Martin thinks that’s it; he’s not got a particularly large set of examples to verify, for the obvious reason. 

It makes Martin feel a flicker of potential, not-quite-instantiated annoyance, and then the knowledge of what precisely is annoying him makes his heart hurt, and then he stows both feelings away where he’s habituated to keeping them, pretty much on autopilot. It’s fine, he thinks, holding the thought at arm’s length, the idea of what ‘fine’ means to him from a practical perspective. (He’s not— he’s just not.) It’s fine. He very much doesn’t want it to _not_ be fine, for one thing. It’s not like anything irritating is going to trouble him much longer, for another. Hardly worth holding on to any part of it. 

When Jon breathes in it’s like he’s inhaling tension directly into his spine—it’s not like the actual uses he has for air are much less figurative, Martin thinks, a momentarily distracting aside darting through his mind as if with borrowed mostly-loving wryness—and Martin thinks, okay, okay, that’s it, one way or another that’s what it looks like when Jon _does_ get it, that’s why Jon’s holding himself back with that sudden consciousness of his body that’s palpable secondhand but tipping his head forward in a way that can’t soften his gaze because nothing in this universe could. “You’ve changed,” he says. 

“Well,” Martin says. If that’s Jon beginning to concede the point then Martin’s not all that surprised to dislike the experience. “Yeah. People do that, Jon.”

“Yes.” Jon pinches his nose and Martin feels, for the first time in this conversation, the specific discomfort of not being sure where he stands after all. Though the gesture does take his eyes off Martin for the duration. “They do.”

Martin swallows. “Okay. You know what, I give up. What are you getting at, here?”

“I’m not…” Jon puts his hand back down, though then he blinks, once, slow. “I— I’m trying to work out how to tell you. It’s, i-it’s that— When I— When I use—”

“When you do the smite-y thing?” Martin interrupts, half trying to be funny, all failing in practice. 

“ _When I use my power_ ,” Jon says, ignoring him, the amount of effort pushing through his stutter takes him so obvious Martin can’t resent him for it. “When I call on the Eye I don’t get to choose what happens to people. It feels the same for me regardless. I just— it— I know I start— It just _goes_.” Quieter, he says, “I didn’t— With, with Jordan, that wasn’t me deciding to save him, I just…”

“If you don’t decide that, who does?” Martin knows as he says it that this is the wrong question, because it’s all but shouted, because it racks down his arms like a tremor and it isn’t actually a question at all. 

“If I didn’t know better I would think… It feels like they’re getting what they deserve.” Jon laughs, a little, his eyes slightly too wide. “That’s, it’s, that’s not how anything works, that’s the antithesis of how it works. I know that!” He runs his hand through his hair and gets louder and faster by increments and Martin doesn’t know how to talk him down from this, not now, not when it’s his own fault. “I know that and I tell myself I know that but I take and I take because all I _do_ is take and it feels _right_. It always… feels… right. Like I can capture all of them in that moment and, and fix the person in amber and set them in their proper place for good and be sure that I would never need to Know anything more about them because I could be sure I’d already have Seen it all.”

Martin thinks, _so the silver lining for you is that at least you find out what happens to me, then,_ but he doesn’t trust himself quite enough to say so. It would come out wrong, he’s almost sure of it, like something he doesn’t actually mean at all. Not convincingly to get he wants, let alone convincingly as an expression of sympathy, the way he’d want it to. 

He does try, at least, to imagine what it’s like, from what kind of perspective someone could say that Jon had done the same thing to Jordan and Jude Perry both. But it’s hopeless at the outset, Martin can’t get his head around it. 

“I don’t choose what I do but I choose when I do it,” Jon says forcefully; his voice almost breaks, and then it holds instead. “And even if, if I did think It— that I could Know you like that, like the others, I still— I wouldn’t do it. I won’t. I don’t _want_ to.”

One thing at a time. The question serves two purposes, anyway, at least enough to keep the subtext around the edges from knocking Martin back on his heels. _Even if I did think that I could Know you like that_. “Why not?” 

Voice trailing off with incredulity, Jon does little more than mouth the first _“Why not?”_ back at him. “Did you think— Wait. You thought I would. That I could do that to you.”

“I wouldn’t have asked you if I thought you didn’t.”

“Yes, well, I wasn’t expecting you to ask at all!” Jon seems to expect a response but Martin’s not sure what he could say to that. It’s hardly news he’s capable of surprising him still, that’s… 

It occurs to him with a light and whispering chill that from Jon’s perspective that just proves his point. 

“Just— look at it this way. The… The Eye Sees everything that is and everything that has been, I, I Know the past because it’s, it’s part of the world I See all the time anyway, it’s not sectioned off from the present. But that’s it, that’s where It stops— where _I_ stop, I don’t know anything about the future before it’s found out.” His voice gets just that bit too soft to be quite right, when Jon talks about Beholding. Just the same way it always has. “And, I, I mean, I said. One way or another there’s nothing left for me worth Knowing again, a-after I… stare someone down like that. Like you’re asking me to. And that’s not…” His eyes dart to one side, then the other, like he can catch the right words if he’s quick enough reading them out the world somehow. 

(Like a cat with a laser pointer and maybe about as hard to fault for it, Martin had thought, at— at some point, it’s not like the mannerism is a new one. It wanders back into his head now and he just doesn’t know where from. He has so much practice at thinking about Jon at this point that he hardly knows when he would have— but it’s not important. That’s not the point.) 

“You’re more important than that,” Jon says. Very deliberately, with a too-long pause right after, so much tangible work done just to get the words out. “To me.”

Martin tries to do something he thought he was recently good at, and more recently had thought to never do again. He takes up his own feelings as if they could be laid out flat and folds them, neatly, every element of care he knows how, everything tying him to Jon and why that matters, tucked mentally up behind his ribs where it matters and it’s safe and it’s safe from reaching out. The process is much more unwieldy than he remembers, this time. He’s lost the knack so quickly it seems to weigh on his lungs. “And I just… don’t get a say in that?”

To Jon’s credit—which means that there, there’s the same love, barely still for even a moment, winding its way out through the cracks of him and back to where it belongs at the slightest of pretexts because maybe Martin’s forcibly forgotten and maybe the truth is he never learned to do that in a way that could distance him now at all—but to Jon’s credit, he has a hard time of answering, and it shows on his face clear as anything, clear as everything else. 

“Not really,” Jon says. “No.” 

He meets Martin’s eyes then, which is to say Martin lets him. Martin doesn’t ask why. When he blinks again it’s very slow. 

Jon says, quiet, “Why would anyone?” 

And the extent to which Jon’s power is what knits the entire fabric of this universe is such that even that rhetorical question sets off sparks all up and down Martin’s own spine.

**Author's Note:**

> The title references “Heaven Help My Heart” from Chess, because of reasons. My logic for the prompt is “Fundamental incompatibility between ‘how something Beholding thinks’ and ‘how something Lonely thinks’ are a kind of cultural disjoint”. Also, I’m right, don’t @ me.
> 
> I mean, you can’t @ me, I don’t really have any fannish social media. I do like comments—and the opportunity for interacting with people they provide—though!


End file.
